An Interrogation
by nneurosis
Summary: "Twenty questions. Whatever I want. I'll ask them, you'll answer them, and you'll be truthful."
1. Chapter 1

Author's note: This takes place in an AU established by my other fic, Earth To, but it's not necessary to read that one in order to understand it. Basically, after Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone, Amy convinces him not to go and pick up Rory. You can hope to see the next chapter in a couple of weeks!

I guess it's also worth noting that this started out as a very silly idea and became something... else.

* * *

><p>"Are you shagging River?"<p>

It's a question uttered so plainly and without provocation, he acts as if he's misheard her.

"Am I snagging what?"

She shakes her head, and swallows a mouthful of relkurt (sounds exotic but it's just a 30th century burger, honestly) then grins across at him.

Relkurt calls the tenth moon of Quatar-2 home, and that's where they are right now, sitting under the vast glass ceiling of an Earth colony bio-dome, with the purple, sandy exterior landscape as a backdrop for Amy's small feast. The dunes, in shades of mauve and taupe, are like something out of an impressionist watercolor. The word she comes up with for it is "otherworldly", but she quickly realizes that's self-evident.

The Doctor doesn't eat. Ever, it seems. He is, she thinks simply, weird.

"I asked if you're shagging River."

His brow ascends, his eyes widen, and he stares at her.

She giggles, bemused. "What? Is it because I said shag?" She lowers her voice and leans slightly across the table. "Are you and River intimately involved?"

The Doctor leans back in his chair and eyes her, his face now scrunching comically. "That's a bit private, don't you think?"

"We're friends!" She drags a 30th century chip, a relkat, along the side of her plate, sopping up some stray mustard. Surprisingly, 30th century chips taste about the same as normal chips. "Friends talk about these things. Like, I can tell you that Rory and I—"

He yelps and clamps his hands over his ears. Amy just talks louder.

"—_shag frequently_." Defeated, his arms drop and he glares, and her tone returns to normal. _Shag_must not have the same connotation here as it does on the motherplanet, because passersby hardly seem to notice the word being shouted at him. "Well, not nowadays, obviously, because I'm with you." The Doctor's gaze flies upwards at this, and she pauses for an instant, catching his look. "But we did, and plus, I've always had a really vivid imagination—"

"You can stop there," he says hastily.

Having embarrassed him enough for one day, Amy shrugs. "Have it your way. But I'm a creative dreamer." In a millisecond, her eyes slide down his person, too quickly for him to do anything other than toss her a curious, somewhat violated glance. "And I'll get the River thing out of you."

"Will you?"

"Oh, of course." She bites off an ambitious bit of relkurt and begins to chew thoughtfully. Her eyebrows twitch skywards. "Always do."

At the top of a very tall tower in the center of the Red Desert on Upslion Andromedae C resides an Eogian monk. He is, they say, one of the great philosophical minds in the known universe—and the view isn't bad, either.

The Doctor _desperately_wants to go. But religious law stipulates that a woman, to prevent any natural imbalance from infiltrating the sanctuary, must accompany each man who enters the tower.

Amy tells him it's an awful lot of stairs.

"Please." He takes her arm, pouting furiously. "Just for a bit. I came all the way here to see him."

"It took you ten seconds to get here with the TARDIS."

"She's been confiscated by the monks!"

"Temporarily. I love that they have a security line before you go in, it's just like an airplane."

He waves his free hand hopelessly at her. "Still! Traumatic experience!"

She gives him a clearly skeptical look. He shakes his head.

"Okay, okay—but _please_, Amy, I'll make it up to you—"

"So you'll owe me?" He nods. "Fine." With boyish enthusiasm, he starts to bounce in the tower's direction, an all-encompassing grin crinkling his face. "Wait!"

He stops, and turns back to her, suspicious. Amy smiles. Her news is unpromising, and he can tell.

"What?" he demands hesitantly.

"Twenty questions. Whatever I want. I'll ask them, you'll answer them, and you'll be truthful."

The Doctor appears to be scanning her with his eyes as he might scan an alien life form with the sonic, but to no avail. She's just standing there, _smirking_at him. He doesn't have a clue what she's on about, and she likes it.

"Blackmail?" he inquires.

"Yep." Still smirking. He flinches, and takes a long step towards her, his gaze riddling.

"Twenty questions about _what_?"

The smirk turns to a grin. "Whatever I want."

After an extended, consternating pause on his end, he says, "Absolutely not. I'll find another woman."

"Okay," she replies, unfazed.

They both look around. They're still in the desert. There's nothing, aside from the monk sitting under an umbrella at the foot of the tower, examining the keys to the TARDIS with mild curiosity.

"Twenty questions?" asks the Doctor.

"Twenty."

"Five."

"Twenty."

"Ten."

"Twenty."

He groans—she laughs.

"Fine! Twenty questions, Amy Pond."

They settle in the privacy of the TARDIS library that night, in the middle of the massive floor space that now exists between the three-story walls of shelves, since the swimming pool wandered off. It's the pair of them facing one another on a plain of Persian rug, the fire crackling pleasantly and the record player scratching out a song Amy doesn't know, a slow, brassy number with all the hot trumpet you could ask for and a raspy female singer musing on the distance between her and her lover.

In an armchair opposite his, she tugs a slip of paper out of her pocket.

"What's that?" he asks, peering nervously at it.

"My questions."

"When did you find the time to do that?"

"When you were talking to the monk about custard." She gives him her most winning smile, and he frowns.

"This is beginning to come off as an interrogation, Pond."

Smiling still, she says quite plainly, "That's because it is." And she flattens the list against her thigh, clearing her throat. "Okay."

_Question one: What kind of genitals do you have?_

He continues to stare at her, expression unchanged, for a long beat. Then, finally: "Can you repeat the question?" She nods.

_Question one: What kind of genitals do you have?_

He shifts uncomfortably in his seat, trying to come to grips with the nature of the inquiry. "_Amelia_."

"What! All you've got to say is if you're like a human bloke or not." She shrugs, trying to look scientific about it, and continues in a brazen tone, "After I asked about River I thought maybe you were so shocked because you can't actually, you know, breed with humans. That you might be all smooth down there like a little boy dolly."

His whole body goes rigid, and he can barely choke out his protest for the shock. "I am not—_all smooth_—" Swallowing his indignation, he shakes his head. "If all the questions are going to be like this, then the deal is off," he proclaims, crossing his arms with a dramatic flourish.

"It's not a deal! You promised," she cries, sounding not unlike her eight-year-old self. They glower at each other.

With a heavy sigh, he concedes, and groans a little as he half-smushes his face into one of the cushions, muffling his reply. "Like a human bloke."

"Thank you!" She grins victoriously, and consults the list. "So, going off of that."

_Question two: how does Time Lord sex work?_

"Are they all about _parts_?"

"D'you mean are they all about sex?" she replies, gleeful in thwarting his attempts at childish subtlety.

"_Yes_." His expression seems to be wishing her harm.

She consults the list again. "About fifty percent parts, fifty percent other, I'd say."

"Joy," he mutters, and then hesitates. "Like… a human, again."

"Alright, so, in that case."

_Question three: Are you shagging River?_

"Not to my knowledge," he snaps.

This results in such a look of horror and amusement from Amy that he immediately explains himself.

"I don't know! I don't know who she is, and the River you met has already gotten to know me quite well—future me, that is—so how am I to know what she means to me or-" and he cringes, "what we may have done."

"I bet you did," gasps Amy, sitting forward, knuckles white on the armrests. "I bet you did, and it was filthy, and that's why she's all elevator eyes when she's around you. She doesn't even _need_her imagination. She's just remembering!"

The Doctor shrugs, and glares at the fireplace. It's too dark to really tell, but she thinks she sees the shadow of a blush creeping up his neck.

"Though in all fairness, I've elevator eyed you more than once," she muses. It gets a smirk out of him. "Oh, come off it. Nobody likes a bloody tease."

"Some people do." She chortles, and he sits up in offense. "Hey!"

_Question four: Do you fancy her, then?_

The answer is an egregious whine: "I don't know!"

"Again? You're useless, you are." She shakes her head reprovingly, and then reconsiders, a smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. "But that's not a no, is it?"

The Doctor swings his gawky legs over one armrest and leans back against the other, muttering something darkly.

"I'll take that as a yes, then," she intones, flicking her notes smartly.

She's about to read the next question when he pipes up again out of nowhere. "_No_."

"What?"

"No. I do not," he declares, looking squarely at the fireplace, unmoving. Amy rolls her eyes and shrugs, her nonchalance strictly designed, careful not to gaze with scrutiny, or anything, really, that might indicate her inquiries were motivated by an impulse deeper than curious immaturity.

"Okie doke." She licks her lips.

_Question five: Have you ever slept with one of your traveling companions?_

"Pond!" he cries, arms raised in pointless frustration.

"What, I saw the TARDIS pictures—nine hundred years surrounded by hot pieces, you must've caved sometime."

"Absolutely not." The fierceness of this statement procures yet another eye roll from Amy, and he huffs once, feathers ruffled.

"Yeah, well, I don't believe it," Amy replies frankly.

"Are you—"

"I mean, I heard what Liz Ten said. You shagged Liz One and ran off. Only makes sense that you're a sex fiend," she says, with a matter-of-fact-ness usually reserved for the mean judge on singing reality shows.

He waves a hand dismissively, his brow still rumpled with annoyance. "That was a mess. There was telepathy involved, and some psychic memory manipulation, not the cleanest escape so the history books have got a thing or two wrong—but the point is that I didn't, and I wouldn't."

But, peering at him with her chin propped up by her fist and a winning smirk, she still looks entirely unconvinced. Seeing this, the Doctor's tongue loosens strangely, and he flails to prove himself as if his life depended on her not thinking of him as a lowlife cad.

"Just because I _could_, physically, biologically, doesn't mean I want to, or that—that I would ever betray someone in such a way, knowing full well that any sort of prolonged romantic or emotional attachment is doomed as a result of the fundamental difference in genetics that ultimately exists between myself and the people who travel with me, the humany versus Time Lordy parts. It would be unkind of me to subject anyone to that turmoil, let alone subject myself to it, time and time again."

It's silent for a long moment. Amy's not smirking anymore, at least.

"Nine hundred years and some baggage, then," she says quietly, finally.

"Hmph." He's looking at the fire again. She blinks a few times to regain composure, and then clears her throat. The turntable in the corner skips erratically, and, having nearly forgotten its presence, she turns to listen before going forward, waiting for the music to adjust and continue without stuttering syllables. And it does.

_Question six: Have you ever been in love?_

His far off gaze doesn't falter; he doesn't flinch. "Yes."

She nods once and moves on.

_Question seven: What did you look like first?_

"Excuse me?" he asks, squinting quizzically at her.

"Like..." Amy gathers her thoughts, glancing to the rafters. "You change bodies, yeah? But you had to have been born with a body, what did that look like? Like a baby?"

"I don't remember," he jokes, to an eye roll from her. "I was a boy, though."

"Bet you were a pain."

The previous tension seems forgotten, and the Doctor's playfulness hops giddily back into action. "Still am," he affirms proudly. Amy chuckles, and thinks of that good kind of hurt.

_Question eight: Do you have a closet of tweed and bowties and boots or do you always wear the same ones?_

"Same ones."

Her face wrinkles with displeasure. "Gross."

"The TARDIS cleans them! Every night, when I'm sleeping." He strokes an armrest fondly, as if he were caressing the ship itself. "I put them in my closet, and when I wake up a couple of hours later, they smell fresh as space daisies!"

She has to choose which strange suggestion to force him to elaborate on—the fact that he only sleeps a couple of hours a night, the existence of space daisies, or—

_Question nine: So what do your pajamas look like, then?_

"What pajamas?" He grins. Amy laughs delightedly, bounding into her next question.

_Have you ever seen_ Overboard_?_

She receives a puzzled expression. "The film?" he asks.

"Yes. With Goldie Hawn."

"I have. Why'd you want to know that?"

She shrugs. "It's my favorite movie."

A little smile tempts the outline of his mouth. "It's a good one."

_Question ten: Do you—_

"It's question eleven."

"No it's not!"

"Yes, it is. Nine was my pajamas, ten was _Overboard_, and this is number eleven."

She concedes with a glare. "Oh, fine, you."

_Question eleven: Do you lick?_

"Lick what?"

She raises a single fine, red eyebrow. He blushes hotly and squirms in his seat.

"Amy," he cautions, but she's unabashedly enjoying herself again.

"Just tell me." He snaps back to look at the fire.

"Why would you want to know that?" asks the Doctor mildly, not doing much to feign enthusiasm for the particulars of this conversation.

"Says a lot about a man," she retorts.

"Does it?"

"Yeah. So?"

He continues to watch the fire, unfazed. Her jaw clenches, but a thought occurs to her, and she has to fight a smile.

"All right, then," she says. "It'll be a surprise." She glues her eyes to the paper expressionlessly, but she can feel him staring.

_Question twelve: Where does the food in the kitchen come from?_

He recovers from her last devastating comment quicker than she'd have guessed. "The TARDIS."

"I know, but how does the TARDIS make the food? Does it pop down to the intergalactic Tesco and pick up a few ingredients every Sunday, or what?"

"She. The TARDIS is a she," he corrects smoothly, and considers her point, leaning back across the chair with his hands across his chest and his gaze towards the ceiling. "You know, I've never really thought about it."

"So you don't know! It just appears," she exclaims. "It's not even real food."

"Of course it's real food. I've been eating it for hundreds of years, and I'm perfectly fine."

Amy replies, once again brazenly blunt, "You're a daft wanker who runs about in a bowtie and trousers that don't fit properly," She pauses for searing emphasis. "_And_you think you look bloody hot."

"So do you," he shoots back savagely, and then withdraws slightly from the accompanying glare, as if he didn't understand why his mouth would ever bring up such a topic. But Amy is smirking.

_Question thirteen: Do you like Rory?_

"Sorry, who?" Her face contorts with such offense that he instantly realizes whom she's referring to. "Oh! Him." He taps the end of his nose, remembering, while she pouts. "He's an alright bloke, yes."

The singer on the record wails out a strikingly discordant note, and both their heads turn. By the time she's back to low, grumbling tones, Amy has another thought. "He hates you."

The Doctor scoffs. "What, the mobile bill? If it bothers him so much I'll pay him back, just need to find an ATM."

She shakes her head, laughing, but barely. "No, it's not that. After Prisoner Zero and everything, and you just ran off again, he was right livid. Because I was—" She stops herself, realizing for the first time that Rory is the only person who ever really knew, who she'd ever really talked to about it. And here she was, going to reveal all to the man—the alien—himself. Almost reveal. She puts a delicate pale hand to her bottom lip and traces, considering. "Because he thought I was upset and disappointed and all. Which I wasn't, because, you know, I was used to you not being there. Anyway, he doesn't think you deserve my company, or something like that. He's a bit of a twat sometimes." Shaking off the largeness of it all, she settles back into the plushness of the armchair, slumping comfortably. "Would be furious if he knew I was with you now."

"But I'm making up for it," says the Doctor, calmly, looking very grown up just then, in the face of her accusations. "All this traveling, time and space."

Amy shrugs and refuses to meet his eye. "I'm not the one with the problem."

_Question fourteen: Have you ever killed anyone?_

He wills her to look at him for this one. Yeah—some psychic rubbish, no doubt, that has her staring into those depths of greying green, like antiquated sea glass.

"I killed the Daleks," he responds quietly. "Bob the Cleric and most of his friends, Octavian. Prisoner Zero, even." He tries to ease the harshness of his words with the softness of his voice, and it works. To a degree.

"No, you didn't," she starts to argue, but can't find the explanation she knows is there. Can't voice the passionate defense that surges up inside her. It's so obvious to her that none of it was his fault, that he had never wantedanyone to die, and he never would, because he's _the Doctor_—he fixes people, and she's known him all her life.

"I did, Amelia." This confidence in the face of admitting to homicide frightens her as much as it soothes her. "They died because of me. It's okay. No need to dress it up as something it isn't." He gives her what is clearly intended to be a reassuring smile, and she mirrors it weakly. "What's the next question?"

_Question fifteen: Why are you called the Doctor?_

"I don't know, perhaps you ought to ask the people who call me that. Though, come to think of it, I call me that, so you can ask me, in which case I have to say that I haven't the foggiest."

_Question sixteen: Will you die of old age?_

"Exceptionally cheerful, Pond!" he chirps, and then sighs in a single great gust, his whole body deflating a bit and sinking two inches lower in the chair. "D'you mean am I immortal?"

"I suppose. I know your body can die and you'll be okay, but…" She doesn't need to finish.

"We had laws about these things." He folds his hands across his stomach, waggling a dangled foot absently. "But now it's just me."

Amy hesitates, and then asks, "So what does that mean?"

"It means I'm going to find out," avers the Doctor, with a manic grin.

_Question seventeen: How long can I stay?_

"I prefer not to make those decisions, Pond." He shrugs his shoulders, fringe shaking into his eyes. "Circumstance usually has the final stay, but ideally, you'll go when you want to."

"But I'll never want to," she says easily, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, an edge to her voice that's almost insulted he would ever expect that of her.

"Oh, Amelia, I certainly hope that isn't true." She looks up and wrinkles line his face, creases she knows weren't there before. It's hard to tell if his plaintive half-smile diminishes or augments the appearance of his age, but his age does appear, strange and contradictory, like the top coat of paint peeling away to reveal what's old and cracked and underneath.

She doesn't like the swelling confusion in her head, so she moves to the next question like it might keep her from remembering this again later, her voice quieter than ever.

_Question eighteen: How many companions have died with you?_

She glues her gaze to the list deliberately, but she can see his head shaking in the corner of her eye. Her stomach lurches, doubting, just for a moment.

And then he says, with affected gentleness, "Don't." She breathes as steadily as she can muster and doesn't look over at him, still.

_Question nineteen: Have you ever been married?_

He inhales heavily—so heavily she can hear it. A long beat, probably too long, because she's waiting again. "I have."

Amy shuts her eyes.

_Question twenty: Do you have children?_

"I think we are done for tonight," he announces, getting to his feet, his good humor determined but poised to break.

"I'm not done, though. You said twenty, that's question twenty—"

"No, Amelia!" A quiet roar, a sudden break in composure. Something flashes in his eyes that is very ancient and very sad and she feels like an insolent child, with him glaring down at her, his chest rising and falling and shaking ever so slightly. He seems to get his grip back, but just barely, his quiet voice unsteady. "That's enough. You've learned enough."

"Sorry," she mumbles, and he promptly ignores it.

"Go to sleep." His tone is harsh, condescending—more than she feels she deserves. The spitfire surges in her belly and wends hastily to her throat, and she fights him, now, without further thought.

"I don't want to," she retorts.

His fist clenches in response. "_Go to sleep_."

"How many? How many children do you have?" demands Amy, instinctively reaching out to grab his arm, but he recoils at the question. She can see him battling the anger that caused him to lash out before, but, she realizes, she doesn't want him to win. It's an emotion, anger, just like the emotions that grip her everyday while he exudes optimism and the occasional loaded musing, and she longs to bleed him for the feelings she's only glimpsed, for a _human_heart, because she knows one of them must be that—human.

He turns on his heel and marches away from her, towards the door, and wrenches it open.

"What are their names!" she calls after, desperate. It rings, up into the cavernous rafters of the library, up into the dark.

He doesn't bother to shut it behind him, and she can hear the thuds of his enraged footsteps echoing down the TARDIS corridors, back to the library, finding her and slamming against her eardrums. The record player croons on, though the lyrics are nigh incomprehensible at this point, and the song it plays exudes melancholy.

Soft, a little reverential, she asks one more question, mostly to herself, now that she's alone.

"What's your name?"


	2. Chapter 2

She waits thirty minutes before she goes looking for him.

Probably should have made it an hour, because he's still glaring when she finds him in the console room. He's elbow-deep in a panel of wires on the dashboard, grease smudges peppering his bare arms and rolled up sleeves, and a particularly endearing one at the end of his nose. He must see her come in, because the valley in his brow deepens, but he doesn't look up.

She stands at the bottom of the stairs, as if waiting for permission to approach. He pointedly ignores her.

"Okay," she says, grudgingly. "I'm sorry."

At this, the Doctor straightens himself briskly, sniffing. The glare melts from his face, replaced with aloof nonchalance. He shrugs.

Amy groans. "Fine, I'm _really_sorry."

"I believe you," he replies, softening somewhat. "That you're feeling remorse, I believe it. But while I am all for breaking boundaries, Pond—love it, actually, one of my favorite activities, right up there with water-skiing—it's important that we're not thoughtless with one another."

A little gauge in Amy's head flips from humility to indignation_._"I thought about those questions!" she shoots back.

"Really?" The softness evaporates, his mouth forming a hard line. "In the twenty minutes you were writing them up in that tower, you fully considered all the repercussions you asking me those things might have?"

"Twenty minutes is a long time," she says flatly. "Five is even longer."

She gives him a significant look, with more meaning and defiance than she could ever properly put into words. It's a stare with the kind of intensity that could stump even men who've lived for centuries—which it does.

He turns back to the console abruptly, a white-knuckled hand gripping the nearest lever. "I did mean it earlier, when I said enough."

"Fine." She folds her arms across her chest, as if it might guard her. "Are you going to take me home?" she demands, or tries to, since the words knot in her throat and come out affected.

"Would you like to go home?" She gapes a little, and he jumps on the silence, with a dutifully upbeat tone and a frownless face that do nothing to disguise his frustration. "Would you like to go and get married, right now? I could have you at the chapel in seconds, though he'll probably be a bit confused when you don't show up in the dress." He swings around again and marches towards her, now. "However, I'm sure he'd be more confused if you tried to explain to him what motive you could have possibly had for running away on the night before you were getting married."

His marching stops, destination reached—his face is a nose's length from hers, and he's riled her enough. Submission was never really her thing, and there's something especially titillating about arguing with the Doctor—maybe it's the stakes or the odds—maybe she's a bit turned on. Wouldn't be unheard of.

"So you're going to chide me for running away, when you lost your people hundreds of years ago and you're still in the denial stage?" Her words come out like darts and she grabs his arm instinctively, tugging him closer. He struggles against the contact, but not very hard. "D'you really think that's fair to them? Fair to their memories, pretending like it never happened?"

If there were a line in this conversation, she'd both found it and crossed it. The tension in his jaw breaks, eyes flashing dangerously. He jerks himself away from her, his face shielded from her view as he pushes his way past her, making for the stairs.

She feels a bit dumb, just then.

She chases him, though they're in the corridor before she finally catches him up and wraps about his torso from behind, burying her face in the tweed despite the itch, breathing deeply and smelling something that's probably space daisies. She doesn't say she's sorry, not with words, and after a few seconds he maneuvers himself, still encircled, to face her. He hugs back, and that's it for a while, hugging, as he shakes and sighs into her shoulder. Their embracing bodies feel oddly comfortable, like they fit together despite the angularity of their joints and jutting bones. Which is sort of like people in general, she thinks, who sometimes go together even when they shouldn't.

When he pulls away it's to press a kiss to her forehead, and she snivels loudly, an ugly bodily noise that brings them both back down to (metaphorical) Earth.

"You've got grease on your nose," she observes. Immediately his hand flies to his face and searches hopelessly for the spot, but she shoos it away. "Stop, I'll rub it off for you."

She thinks about that statement and snorts, and he catches on and smirks, and by the time she's returned his nose to normal they're both giggling uncontrollably, ready to fall over on one another.

"You are a terrible influence," the Doctor declares.

"Look who's talking, mister _come away with me_." Her eyebrows quirk—suggestively, as always.

His mouth twitches out a smile that she mirrors automatically. "Good night, Amy," he mutters, quieting, thumb on her cheek. He gestures down the hall towards her room, with a leading hand in the small of her back.

"'Night." She starts to go, but pauses, turning back to him. "Gotcha," she says breathily, like it's this dangerous test, like she's toeing the line again.

But he just laughs and turns on his heel and bounds down the stairs back into the console room.

She falls asleep smiling.

It takes her longer than it should have to yank the last of several yellow burrs from a bloody, punctured lesion on his back, mostly because his occasional, stifled whimpers are—distracting. When she's freed him, his whole body shudders.

"Thank you," he sighs, drooping.

Her nose wrinkles as she examines the burr. "This is disgusting." She looks to his wound and her forehead wrinkles, too. "_That _was disgusting."

"Oh, it'll heal," chirps the Doctor. "Rather quickly, I expect. My shirt?" She tosses the garment (now with a large red-rimmed hole in the back) over his shoulder, and scoots round to better face him. He hisses at the sight of the clothing infraction. "Never been so happy to have left my tweed in the TARDIS."

As he buttons himself up, she reexamines their surroundings—a cavernous, chilly all-marble reception hall in a great palace on some abandoned planet. The ghost planet, she'd called it at first. Then there'd been the signs-of-life reading, which had turned out to be an infestation of slithering, vine-like, carnivorous and burr-shooting plants.

Now, mostly clothed, his face crinkles, as he seems to sense some internal balance being violated. "Uck. Paralytic venom."

"Isn't the point of paralytic venom supposed to be that you can't feel it?" She throws him a bemused glance.

"Theoretically. But," he continues, pulling his braces back into place. "Most venomous species haven't evolved to deal with Time Lord bodies, or aren't even capable of doing so. It would take an exceptionally powerful, biologically specific poison to affect me." He clamors to his feet and she follows.

"You know," Amy observes conversationally. "You'd seem like a lot less of a prat if you just explained things as 'special alien rubbish' every once and a while." He sticks his tongue out, off her grin.

"My bowtie, Pond?" he asks, hand outstretched and collar turned up in preparation. Her face falls, remembering. Immediately sensing wrongness, his new tone reflects that urgency. "Where is it?"

"Well, I—" She smiles apologetically, and pulls the tattered remains of his prized neckwear from her pocket. He gasps. Dramatically. "I tried to save it, I swear! But one of them had it in its—mouth thing? And chewed it all up. I ran back to try and grab it, but…" She places the scrap in his open palm, trying not to let his forlorn expression condemn her. "I'm sorry," she winces.

"No, no. It's quite alright." He strokes the remainder, like the corpse of a recently departed pet, and then tucks it gently into his pocket.

They start out of the eerie stone chamber, down an equally eerie stone corridor. The most distinguishing features of this place are the echoes of their footsteps and the dust—not cobwebs, even, not without spiders to weave them. Despite the fact that no one has lived here for millennia, the Doctor told her when they'd arrived, the limited weather and absence of tectonic movement means the buildings, the once-great cities, will remain much the same through the ages, for hundreds of thousands of years, maybe. Which, Amy thinks, is sort of beautiful. Until you get attacked by evil plants.

"I apologize for the turn this jaunt has taken," he tells her, as they traverse the hallways. Both of them have their eyes peeled for more vine-things.

"Did you expect something non-dangerous when the TARDIS said there were life forms on a planet that everyone up and left a thousand years ago?" She fumbles for the torch in her coat, since the sun can be seen setting through one of the palace's glassless arching windows, bathing them in vermilion.

"Yes!" His eyes light up. "Perhaps a little flower in the middle of a rocky plain. Signaling a new era of life for a tired, ancient planet. A little bit of hope."

"Well," she sneers. "I _hope _your back heals up nicely." She catches him with a smile out of the corner of her eye.

"I'll give you one thing, Pond—your lack of optimism is certainly determined." A smile is one thing, but it's harder to tell if it's real admiration in his voice, or just disappointment dressed up in nice clothes.

"If you always expect the worst, you can never be let down," she affirms lightly, thoughtlessly, not stopping to consider the relevance of this statement. She's lived with the mantra since she was a little girl, and she tends to forget why—especially when she's with him, an ironic source-monitoring error. But she finds irony frustrating, out of her control: a toppling, mocking entity, and she prefers not to grapple with blame. "So I suppose I never really saw the point in optimism."

"That's because you're young." He's still smiling, but the character of it has changed. His age shows. She used to like that, when she first started to know it: _very old and the very last_. But as time goes on, she learns more, and doesn't just know; she understands, and it begins to hurt.

And normally she'd rebuke that kind of condescension, but anyway, she's got a nagging suspicion that he's right.

The Doctor insists that the plants sleep at night, so they will be safe once the sun has fallen. Whether or not he's right, they make it back safely to the TARDIS, which sits on a gravelly hilltop at the city limits.

"What was this place like when there were people here?" she asks as they reenter the ship. It's a hypothetical, but the Doctor is rubbish when it comes to hypotheticals.

A minute later they step out at the same spot they just left, but it looks very different.

It's still night, but the spectral metropolis they walked away from was shrouded in dead darkness, and the one they look out at is freckled with sweet gold lights from windows and doorways. There's a murmuring distant hum of traffic, people shouting, babies crying. You can see movement in the streets, the glimpses and outlines of dotty people going about their business—going home to their families, to the store, to the theater.

Amy lets out a noise that blends a yelp and a laugh, falling against the Doctor. He laughs too, and with an arm tight around her, explains—_they're distant cousins of humans, actually. Were human entirely, once. Up and colonized this place to try and resurrect the aesthetics of ancient Grecian society. That's why there was all that marble and columns we saw earlier. Well, Amy? Do you want to go? Do you want to see?_

She does, and they do.

They eat, first: a feast of foods she recognizes as Mediterranean, but with little kicks she can't place, spacey wacey spices. It's served to them in true Earth restaurant style, which is a bit odd when everyone's wearing togas, but no weirder than statutes that move and kill or Winston Churchill and the Daleks or a time travelling alien with a little-big blue box.

As he's making a big show of trying to eat this item, which looks like a gyro but is entirely orange, in only two bites, she observes that he looks quite different without his bowtie. Like he's… sort of normal? Something in the performance, the Time-Lord-TARDIS-Anywhere-You-Like showmanship, has broken down. She likes it; she knows it's temporary, that walls get built to keep people out, but she feels like he's on her level for once. She recalls the pale, splendid curve from his shoulders to his neck that made her take too long to tend him earlier.

Amy grins, and lets him think it's because he only managed to do it in three bites instead of two.

After dinner, they explore the after hours marketplace, which sounds like it would be more fun than it actually ends up being. It still ends up fun—but an after hours marketplace is, apparently, just a marketplace that's open at night. Rubbishy rubbish, Amy tells him, and he scoffs, and whisks her off to the next thing.

At first she doesn't understand. They're walking away from the town, back to the ship, and she asks, _are we done? Is that it?_ He shakes his head and tells her: _wait, Pond._They get to the TARDIS and they walk right past it, further into the blackened desert, darkness edging out the last patches of glow from the city like obtrusive, unshakable soot.

In the midst of all the dirt and endless dusty ground, and the wind howling out on across the plains, they find a grove. _Olive trees_, he tells her, and with hands linked they wander. They're bigger than most olive trees she knows, thick trunks twisting, lurid limbs inviting climbers. They find the biggest one they can, almost ten meters above her head, and scale it, until they're each sprawled across a branch and looking up.

The two moons and a semi-circle constellation turn the sky into a haunting sort of face mask and they spent a while discussing what, if the universe had a face, it would look like, and could this be it, right here and now? It feels like he should know, and when she says that he laughs and informs her that he hasn't a clue. She feels the showmanship dissipating again—she senses he might feel it too, because he's very quiet suddenly. Then he says,

"Amy."

"Yes?"

"I had two children."

"Thanks," she gulps, and spends the next ten minutes agonizing over the inadequacy of that reply. That's it, she assumes, for their conversation—that's all she gets to know, and it's no small sharing, not for him. And she's, what? Disappointed? No, that's not it.

But she's not satiated. Greedily, she wants to be the one to know him best, to be the one he remembers even if he lives forever.

She knows she'll die thinking of him and his stupid wooden time machine, so it's only fair.

Two hours after she tells him she's going to bed, Amy seeks him out in the library, a book across his lap.

With her hands behind her back, she stands a good distance from his armchair, smiling nervously. She hasn't been back to this room since the night of their argument, which feels like a long time ago, like she was a lot younger then—but it's been a few days at most. It's bizarre, it's time distorted, but what else is new in her life with him?

"Trouble sleeping?" he inquires pleasantly, pulling himself away from the page.

"I thought you could, like, read a book in a second or something," she says, avoiding the question. She hasn't slept well since the Angels, but he doesn't need to hear that from her. She's certain his ship does plenty of spying, as perversely intimate as that might be.

"I can, but it's a bit like chewing your food for a second and swallowing immediately." He drags a long, inelegant finger across the printed words, a movement she watches carefully. "Don't really get the full taste of it."

She nods, and then realizes that's basically the end of her stalling. She fingers the bowtie she's been hiding behind her back for the past minute, the one she spent two hours digging through the TARDIS wardrobe to find, as a gift and a necessity. It _is _a necessity, she reminds herself; it's part of who he is, an outward reminder, a thing she's got to honor. But it's been so nice. Another ten seconds of the bare neck, the broken barrier, of the human Doctor—the normal Doctor, she corrects, if uselessly. The one that's closer to her.

"Amy? Would you like to sit? Are you quite alright?" He squints at her.

"I brought you something." She reveals it, casting him the strip of cloth. He chuckles loudly in delighted surprise and begins to eagerly fumble with the neckwear.

"I knew there was another one in there!" The width of his grin is enough to make her happy she did it.

"Yeah, well, you were right," she replies, hoping he'll be too busy preening to notice her forced lightheartedness.

"Cool?" he asks, and gestures at his neck.

"Never."

She gives him her best laugh and he flails from the chair to wrap her in a hug, so enthusiastic her feet leave the ground for an instant. He spins them, which sends her giggling hysterically into the jacket fabric that scratches less every time she touches it.

"Have I told you lately that you're magnificent, Amy Pond?" he asks, with his fingers threading through her hair, clutching clumsily.

"No, but you better not forget it."

She can't see his face, but the timbre of his voice gathers together, concentrated but still with a gratuitous affection. So much affection, in fact, that she should end this embrace now and walk away whole, but she doesn't, she just clings tighter. She can hear him smiling, his breathe on her neck:

"Never."

* * *

><p>Author's Note: So, this chapter is a bit short and isn't the most exciting thing ever (aside from the abundance of sexual references?), <em>but <em>chapter three is going to see some _major_ development and will be up in a week at the longest, so stay tuned.

Also, reviews are hugely appreciated, since the more it has, the more people are likely to be reading it, and the more incentive I'll have to get stuff done.


	3. Chapter 3

"What do you mean, _where_? You're the one with the encyclopedic knowledge of our options."

"Yes, but I thought perhaps you'd have a request."

Amy flops down into one of the jumpseats and eyes him. He leans back against the console with an eager smile, and toys with his bowtie, expecting her response.

She considers his offer, biting her lip. "I don't know."

He shakes his head, but without easily disguising his mirth at her lack of creativity. "When we left, I said 'anywhere you like', and you seemed rather keen on it, then."

"Yeah, but I didn't think I'd have to come up with ideas out of thin air!" She folds her arms across her chest impertinently. "What's the point of having a tour guide if they don't even list the possible destinations?"

She has a point. "As you wish, Pond," he replies with a chuckle, and swivels back to the controls, coattails fanning out behind him. In nanoseconds, he flips through files in his head that count among numbers well beyond infinity, and grabs the first thing marked _novel! marvelous! new!_ he can catch in the tentacles of thought. "Vienna, 1791. Premiere of _The Magic Flute_. Sound promising?"

He hears the squeak of the seat as Amy stands and approaches from behind. She presses gently into one side of his back, peeking her head around his shoulder to give him a skeptical look. When it comes to boldness of body contact, he thinks, she's the only one who's ever properly given Jack a run for his money.

And it seems like she's only getting more confident—or perhaps he's just begun to notice it more, ever since the library, when it became apparent how much Amy really thinks about—touching.

"The opera?" she asks, not sounding particularly enthused by the prospect.

"Oh, come, Pond," he reproves. "It's _The Magic Flute_! Everyone loves _The Magic Flute_."

She shrugs. "I wouldn't know." At his puzzled expression, she rolls her eyes. "Didn't get much opera in Leadworth, sorry."

"You've never seen it?" he cries, clearly aghast, his face contorting as if it's some personal slight against him. Which it _is_, because it's a slight against the universe and all creation, and he is (clearly) the living being most representative of the universe and all creation. "Okay," he declares, perhaps louder than necessary, and turns his attention to the controls. "You, Amelia Pond, are an exceptionally lucky lady." He tosses her a grin he knows is robustly winning. "Your first time will be the world's first time."

He waits for her delighted, irresistible giggle, and when it hits him, it's like a shot of adrenaline to the heart. He begins to leap around the console, from levers to zig-zag plotters to buttons he loves to press, which only prompts more giggling from her.

She saunters back to the jumpseat, and falls into the leather, observing gleefully, "I'm just like Eve."

Amy puts up a significant fight when he tells her that they're in the eighteenth century, now, and the short skirt will have to go.

"This skirt is part of my identity," she announces, with her hands on her hips. She stares him down in the middle of the spacious TARDIS wardrobe.

"It's not part of your identity! You're Amy Pond. That's a _skirt_." He waves a lengthy, period gown that he's randomly selected from the rack at her, in a probably misguided attempt to reason. It's a nice dress—silk with lace trim, both of a deep maroon color, and a high-waisted, full drape with three-quarter sleeves. He's even found a pair of fancy black gloves to match it, but Amy is utterly indignant.

"It's a metaphor, stupid." The determined glare she gives him is unpromising.

"Please, Amy." He looks hopelessly at the dress in his arms. A plan hatches at the back of his mind. "I'm sure you could pull it off."

This appears to intrigue her, her eyes narrowing as she gives him a calculating once-over. "'Course I could pull it off."

He shrugs, letting his eyes go to the floor, but watching her reaction furtively in his periphery. After a moment, she makes a frustrated noise and rips the gown away from him, marching towards the dressing room, not noticing his victorious grin.

"Idiot," she mutters. "I'll show you _pulling it off_."

She does just that, shows him.

She glides into the console room twenty minutes later, fully dressed and made up, her flaming hair spilling across her shoulders and down her back in loose curls. She doesn't, however, revel smugly in the look on his face (and there most certainly is a look on his face, a brief but noticeable widening of his eyes, his mouth forming a tiny "oh"), because she immediately goes slawjacked at the sight of _his _clothing change.

She's never seen him in anything other than the bowtie and tweed, he remembers, except for the raggedy get-up when they first met. This makes him seem like an entirely different person, all dapper and to-the-nines in a full tux and top hat. In fact, the transformation is almost so dramatic as to seem ridiculous, which is probably why she spends a lot more time ogling him than he spends ogling her. This body fills the outfit differently than others he's had, and in a very good way.

When he recovers from his own momentary astonishment at the sight of Amy in her dress, his face cracks a remarkable grin, which earns him a laugh and serves as an effective reminder to both of them that he still has the bouncy disposition of a trouble-making nine-year-old, no matter what he's wearing. Effectively, his spell is broken, but that's okay; he figures he's already won.

"You look lovely," he compliments, taking her hand as she comes up the steps.

She doesn't return the flattery. She frowns and tugs the thin, white silk scarf around his shoulders. "What's this?"

"A scarf?"

"What's the point of it?" she asks, her nose wrinkling. "It isn't going to keep you warm."

"You're right. It's for show!" Already bored with this discussion of purposeless accessories, he bounds towards the door, dragging her along behind him. "Come along, Pond. I'm ready for the opera."

They step out into the energetic chill of the night in Vienna, and find their way from a back alley to a main avenue. The theatre sits in the suburbs, so they must walk a ways, but the glittering city brims with evening life. History, but not, because it's the present right now—he steals occasional glances at Amy, at the way she's drinking it in, because it takes a long time for the simultaneous occurrence of past and present to get old.

A flash of the psychic paper and they've got a private box, and he can't help but lean towards her chair every ten seconds with some new factoid or anecdote about the city, the composer, the opera.

"Look!" He gestures towards the orchestra in the pit below, and Amy careens her neck to look downward. "There he is. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart!"

"With the wig?" she asks, sounding unimpressed.

"Yes, with the wig." While she's peering elsewhere, he finds himself examining the ends of her hair, brows knit, as if there were a puzzle to be solved in the mussed, winding ginger strands. "He's going to die in a month."

"Really?" Her head tilts slightly, now trying to spot the signs that the little man waving his arms down there wouldn't live much longer.

"Yes. Though he'll conduct the orchestra on opening night, and be here frequently to see the opera." The Doctor lowers his voice secretively. "I think he likes the applause."

Amy giggles. "Was he really as funny as in that film?"

"What film?"

"You know, the one about Mozart."

"There are more than a few films about Mozart, Pond," he declares. "Dozens before your time and infinitely more afterwards. Time rarely forgets a genius like Mozart. He's like Shakespeare, but singing." He's smiling pleasantly, but a strange expression comes across her face. One that curtails him instantly. He searches in the flinching lips and quirking brows for meaning, and then she frowns and he's taken aback.

"Why've you always got to make everything about how I'm just a puny young human being and you're not?"

It's a question that grows franker as it moves forward, her face darkening ostensibly. He leans away, unsure how to deal with this new, threatening Amy.

When he doesn't speak, she adds, "Don't you think I understand you, sort of? Don't you think we're a bit the same?" She turns away from him, towards the stage, and her tone softens. "You look young. So there's a part of you that's young. Like me."

The Doctor breathes out as steadily as he can manage, unsure what could have prompted the attack, and slumps in his seat. She's gone quiet, and he wishes desperately that he could go back to five minutes ago—when he could mutter in her ear, sharing the string of thoughts firing haphazardly across his mind, and inch nearer than permissible without anyone noticing. But of course she notices; she's Amy, she notices everything, and especially the things he doesn't want her to.

The overture starts up and he clears his throat. "It's about to begin," he announces stupidly, and feels grateful she can't see the nauseated look on his face. She doesn't acknowledge him, or move at all.

The irony of humans is that he loves getting close to them for all the reasons he shouldn't.

_Of course _aliens show up. _Of course _they do.

Aliens always show up. He's the Doctor. They_ always show up. _

He's not sure if he invites this somehow, or if he was born with an extra special gene that attracts trouble like flies to honey.

Sometimes it's fun. This time it isn't.

The second act is almost over when the lights flicker to nothingness and the whole building begins to shake, and the crowd screams and screams. The thunderous, terrifying noise deafening them from the standing room below is likely the sound of a stampede, and he shuts his eyes for an instant as some of the cries get muffled, undoubtedly because their owners have fallen prey to the mass, dragged underneath, paralyzed and suffocated. The Doctor and Amy reach out for one another without thinking, and he pulls them into the narrow hallway, where chaos has also invaded—patrons from the other boxes are flooding towards the stairs, pushing and shoving mercilessly.

He turns to Amy, yelling at her to go to the TARDIS and wait for him, trying to push the key into her closed, unreceptive fist. That's his first clue that she isn't going to listen; the next is her hardened, determined stare when she tells him that she won't budge. It's fine, she says—she can do it. He sighs, because that's not the issue.

It takes everything he has, mustering the will to raise his voice so loudly and grip her so hard that she actually looks frightened. _Do as I say_. He makes it echo in her head too, a psychic exclamation point, and he's already exhausted by the time she finally accepts the key and runs from him. And he's still got a crisis to deal with, though it fails in comparisons of difficulty.

Four hours later, the smoke and dust begin to settle, and the Doctor returns to his ship. He looks barer than he did when they left—he never picked up his hat from where he'd set it down in their box, and he had abandoned his jacket at some point. He's just successfully convinced a crew of Aquarbi explorers that Earth is a quarantine world and therefore prevented their landing a massive spaceship on top of the theatre. It involved a lot of fake coughing and wheezing and coercing a special Time Lord gland to make slime ooze from one of his ears, but the otherwise quick fix was worth it.

The doors are still locked. He bangs on them for a full two minutes, calling her name and asking to be let in. Nothing.

He runs back to the theatre so fast he's tripping over himself, bumping into pedestrians and dodging in front of horse-drawn buggies whose drivers shout expletives at his back. He doesn't think how it'd be quicker to hop in the ship and land at the theatre a couple of seconds later. He doesn't _think_; he just runs.

He finds Amy sitting alone on the deserted main stage, where the set now sits in ruin. She holds an apparently injured arm to her chest, but looks happy to see him. He rushes towards her and falls to the floor and gathers her up in his arms too quickly to realize that she's actually laughing.

"I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine," she repeats, but he's still holding on to her like she might float away. He presses kisses to her forehead and then to her temple and cheek, descending. She giggles, still trying to reassure him with words he doesn't hear. "One of those weird horse creatures hit me, but it's okay, I hit him harder." She's struggling gently against his neurotic embrace, so it's half-accident when his lips brush hers.

He recoils instantly, pulling back from her, and a horrifying hot blush spills up his neck. "Sorry," he splutters, and swallows a gush of rage, because he's a massive idiot, really, and_ this can't happen again_.

"Don't be," says Amy, grinning manically, and with her good hand she cups the back of his neck and tries to drag their mouths back together. He evades it hastily, scooting away from her on the wood floor.

"No, I am," he asserts, tugging at his lip, his voice shooting up octaves and his face still reddened. "I'm sorry and I didn't mean it, it was a mistake. Now, we've really go to tend to that arm—blimey, if only I hadn't lost that scarf—" He scrambles to his feet and starts looking around the rubble, as if he might find an escape there.

Amy stands, too, and grabs him, searching again for a second kiss. He wrenches away from her, feeling her nails scratch his arm through the fabric of his shirt. It feels oddly metaphoric. Her eyes narrow, unfaltering.

He pleads with her like he's pleading for his life—and it sort of feels as though he is. "Please, Amy. Stop this. I told you it could never work."

"And I said I was thinking of something more temporary," she shoots back, eyebrows lifting.

"Well, I _wasn't_." It comes out before he can stop it. Nine hundred years and he's gotten fairly good at holding his tongue, but he does commit occasional fallacies. He swallows hard, praying she won't think too hard about that statement.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Amy demands, her arms crossing. Her voice grows dangerously louder. "What are you trying to say?"

The Doctor turns away neatly. His eyes clamp shut and he tries to filter it all properly, and then glue together a coherent explanation. Mostly, he laments on how hard she makes this, and how she ought to shave her head, except not really, though it might help. She persists to invade his space so tenaciously—mental, physical. First the questions, now this. She's intransigent. He brings people along so that he won't be let alone, but she doesn't stop at not alone. The TARDIS picks up on it, even, the raw vitality beating in Amy's chest. Sometimes he'll feel it at night: _restless_—_thinking of him_. The ship likes her presence but he only squirms in his bed and feels warm though the temperature is perfect.

She already knows more than he should have told her, and she'll only press him further, and his struggle against the intimacy of it makes him dizzy. If he gives in now, he'll regret it later.

He's nearly a thousand years old; she's twenty-one. His grip may be slipping, but he can win this fight.

Though, his age doesn't seem to be the advantage he'd thought it would. It weighs him down. She's clever and nimble and more of an optimist than she previously claimed.

He breathes deeply, remembering himself, all that thought compressed to one single instant. "I'm saying that our interests do not coincide. What you asked me for that night was something I don't do, engaged or otherwise. It is not my mode of operating—I take enough advantage of my friends, as is." He exhales slowly, and the swings around again, back to face her. He draws energy from the reserves he has piled up in the back of his head and rubs his hands together, grinning broadly. "So! Let's take a look at that arm."

He makes a move back towards her. She's staring at him, her brow furrowed prettily, and she speaks just as he's about to reach for her wounded limb.

"You're saying you'd sleep with me if you were in love with me."

His eyes flutter closed again, but they've reopened in a half a second. He takes her arm with a gentleness that doesn't match his hard expression when he meets her gaze. Amy looks away immediately. He glances at the cut for a couple of seconds. "It'll be fine. We'll bandage it when we get back to the TARDIS," he says gruffly.

"Sorry for not going back when you told me." He shrugs. She's still not looking at him, which he knows because he's stealing little glances at her out of the corner of his eye. It's a regrettable habit, but one he can't help.

He drops her arm and starts for the door with her trailing behind him. They walk to the ship in silence.

She's the last one into the TARDIS, so she shuts the door behind them. He bounds up the steps and engrosses himself in a menial task at the console.

"Do you, though?" she asks suddenly, and when he looks over at her, she's leaning back against the entrance, considering him inscrutably.

"What?" He plays at confusion, because wouldn't it be grand if he actually didn't know what she was referring to?

"Have, you know—" She pushes herself off the door and takes a few steps towards the deck, still expressionless. "—non-platonic inklings." She finally breaks, a smile catching her lips, which would be a beautiful sight if it didn't come with her foolish tongue. "_Romantic_feelings." It's the word romantic that gets her; she embellishes it so much she has to giggle.

He slams a fist against the console. "It is not _funny_, Amelia!" Much like when he reproached her in the library a few days before, his words punch out fast and hard, and he has to catch his breath.

Amy's smile vanishes. She hates it when he scolds her humanity, but really, this is an instance of what he'd call classic human narrow-mindedness. She doesn't see or understand her own mortality; she doesn't realize he will lose her. It hasn't been long enough since his last slip in this department for him to regain any potent hope.

For her, a fling is a night together. For him, it's a half a century and not much more, with each adventure only a second passing by. Because that's all he's allowed with these terrible wonderful little beings, and though from their perspective it's the opposite of taking advantage to spend all that time together, they always fail to accept that he _will_keep going. He's sure they would see it differently if they did.

"What's so bad about you fancying me?" she inquires flatly, as if to underscore the singular thought process that will never cease to cause him grief. She climbs the steps and then hesitates to go any closer. He takes a very deep breath, calmness restored, and shakes his head.

"I told you," he replies. "You get older and I don't change. I'm nine hundred and seven."

She snorts. "Sorry, I didn't know there was a cutoff age for loving people." He laughs, exasperated.

"You're getting married." It's an attempt. Perhaps he can start listing out all the problems and that'll convince her of his earnest sincerity. He doubts it, though.

"So? I'm an adult. If I wanted to be with someone else I'd do it," she declares, with stunning, audacious nonchalance. She's begun to glare at him.

"But you don't!" he cries, as the back and forth is starting to wear him down, and Amy shrinks back a little. They'll push at each other until one of them falls, and he knows it'll be him. He can't keep a desperate, sad expression off his face, as hard as he tries. "So there is really no point to this discussion, and we are both better off calling it a night and never speaking about this topic ever again." She's peering at her feet, now. He adjusts a setting on the dashboard, waiting for her to leave.

"I'd like to go home tomorrow," she says quietly. His throat clenches and he feels his head droop. The request makes sense, and it's for the best, but greedily it's not what he wants. Which is probably all the more reason that it needs to happen. "Just to visit Rory, and things," she adds, and he's not sure whether he feels happier or sadder than he did at his first thought. "A few days before the wedding, maybe."

"Right," he coughs, hand going up to scratch the side of his face dumbly. "There will be gauze and bandages in your room when you get there. Leadworth, tomorrow, first thing." She nods appreciatively; the two of them still avoid eye contact, with real dedication. "Goodnight, Pond."

She starts for the door, but not without pausing to wrap a delicate hand around his arm. "Goodnight, Doctor." And then she disappears, and he's left alone with the churning in his stomach.

* * *

><p>AN: So, this is later than I said it would be. I'm just going into finals, very busy, etc. Hopefully it was worth the wait.


	4. Chapter 4

AN: You're surprised to see this, aren't you? I have actually been working on this chapter for four months - no joke. (It's not particularly good, though. Don't get your hopes up; mostly talking.) But, those four months were not great for me time-wise or mentally, hence the wait. Hopefully you can still get something out of this chapter, even if you need to go back and reread the first three.

* * *

><p>Amy wakes up swallowed in white sheets and sunrays coming in from the window. She stirs and notices that the clock reads ten, and also that she's alone in the bed, and with a groan, shoves her face into the sheets, as if to block out the shaming stimuli. This proves a bad decision, since the sheets smell absolutely rank. , and Sshe recoils immediately. It figures—not even the best laundry detergent can withstand a few solid hours of sweat and other bodily… excretions.<p>

Sufficiently scolded by the late hour and a barrage of birds chirping noisily outside, half an hour later sees her showered and dressed and sauntering into the kitchen.

Rory is sitting at his rickety little table with the newspaper spread out before him and half a slice of toast hanging from his mouth. He looks very at home in his cramped flat; all the furniture is long-limbed and angular and that weird kind of retro-rustic that can't totally be described, and which only Rory can really pull off. And she's not even sure it's a matter of pulling it off—it's plausible he just spent a lot of time in thrift stores when he was broke during medical school.

His expression brightens instantly when he sees her, and she returns it with a little half-smile, as she sets about fixing herself of a cup of tea.

"Sleep well?" he inquires.

"Yep."

She reclines against the counter, gripping her cup with both hands, and watches him flip a page. It seems strange that someone could be so content with this—late mornings and thrift store furniture—while knowing that a universe exists that is vast and unknown and teeming. She gets the urge to ask him how he's okay right now, how he can just sit there and read about real estate prices and the arrest of a local dog-napper, but it's beyond the scope of her set plans.

She had directed the Doctor to take her to the weekend before the wedding, when a well-to-do friend had surprised her with a spa getaway in lieu of a bachelorette party. Rory wouldn't hear about it until later that afternoon, when Present Amy had already been away for a night, which left Future Amy (her, she supposed, though thinking herself as being a future version was strange) a good window of time with Rory. Her execution was clear enough; her intentions, less so. In true Time Lord style, she was improvising that bit.

And she'd improvised them right into bed, for lack other options.

It was a good way to kill time—which didn't make a whole lot of sense, considering she'd asked to come here and made up all sorts of fibs to realize that goal, so surely there was _some_ purpose lingering in her unconscious. She had gone with her gut, as she was wont to do, and expected a perfectly rational reason to crop up in her awareness when she needed it. When it hadn't, she'd stood in the parlor awkwardly and started kissing him to wipe the puzzled expression off his face. And things progressed.

Now, she tells herself that perhaps some fun, minus the possibility of death or capture, had been the goal all along: a release after the stressful business of several close brushes with mortality, and possibly contracting space madness, and the consecutive heated encounters with the Doctor. Or, alternatively, considering that last one, a projection—but she swats that thought like a fly. Ironically, she'd never been much good at swatting flies; it required too much patience.

She begins to drum her fingers on the countertop. He's gone back to reading. With an enormous yawn, he flips a page. She thinks about how yawning is contagious, and wonders if he means to infect her, or if she's just collateral damage in his war on interesting.

Sighing noisily, she sets her tea down and then, in a single swift movement, moves across the small room and settles into his lap. He has to lift his arms in order to accommodate both her and the paper, which leaves him looking distinctly uncomfortable.

"Hello," he says, uncertain.

Amy gives him a grin and starts burrowing into his neck, working up the beginnings of a fresh hickey. Rory chortles nervously, and brushes her away. "Maybe we should save a little for the wedding night."

The sigh that follows blows out of her with lengthy force, like steam out of a kettle. "Bored!" she declares loudly, hopping to her feet, and then realizes who she's starting to sound like. Swallowing a groan, she faces him. "It's just that—we're sitting. In your kitchen."

"Yes." He looks at her expectantly, as if waiting for a punch line.

"You could be dead tomorrow," she says flatly. "_I_ could be dead tomorrow."

Rory's brow wrinkles, upper lip curling disdainfully. "When did you get to be so doom and gloom?"

"I'm not—" She grits her teeth, falling back to lean against the counter again. "That's the opposite of what I'm saying. I'm saying you could be out doing stuff, doing _anything_, and you're sitting in your kitchen." The last four words come out dripping with derision.

"You're _standing_ in my kitchen," he points out dryly. "Is that any better?"

"I don't always stand in your kitchen," she shoots back, before remembering herself. Her little secret. Or her very big secret, depending on your outlook. "You don't know."

He's looking at her, searching for education or enlightenment. But it's not to be found in her eyes, or even the twitch of her lips—the truth is too complicated for mind-melds. Romanticism had never been her favorite, but she wishes for it now, and desperately. For psychic understanding to grip Rory, and for him to just _know, _like he might if this were some cloyingly sweet love story. The very kind she's always claimed to hate.

No, she'll have to tell him herself. He knows so much about her, more than anyone, more than the Doctor, probably. Everything except the last three weeks. _The most important weeks._ It feels as though it should be enough to just say that, but it won't suffice. Not for Rory—her friend, her oldest friend. Doggedly loyal and occasionally bumbling. He deserves an explanation. _I'll see him again_, she promises. But, then again, what's a promise to the Doctor?

* * *

><p>"Sell me your lumber," he demands, increasingly frustrated.<p>

A message flashes on to the console screen in glowing block letters.

_Insufficient offer_, it reads.

"I've offered plenty. All my brick."

The screen flashes again. _Grain as well_.

"No. No grain." He grits his teeth. "You're beginning to make me regret teaching you to play this game, dear." The ship's lights swell brighter for a moment, which he understands to be laughter of sorts.

The Doctor pouts fiercely, but the TARDIS doors flies open and there is Amy, to rescue him from an embarrassing defeat.

"Hello," she grudges as she enters. He notes glazed-over eyes and a dragging step—tiredness. Tired has a strong correlation with snippy, especially in her, he recalls.

"Hello," he chirps, unfailing cheerful, pursing his lips while she climbs the steps to the console. "The TARDIS and I were just enjoying a round in our long-running game of _Settlers of Catan_. You're welcome to join us. I hope it never falls to me to settle a colony, I fear I'm ill-suited for it." He gives her the best grin he can manage with the hope that a little self-deprecation might shake her free of whatever thing bothered her. "It requires patience, which I've always thought was the dullest virtue."

Alarmingly, his joke gets little to less response. "I'll pass." Amy half-smiles to cover a sigh, and sinks into the jumpseat.

He weighs whether or not to ask for a millisecond. He's still undecided when it comes tumbling out of its own accord. "How is Rory?"

She snorts derisively, but answers anyway. "Not so good, I'd guess. Or perhaps very good, I don't really know." He squints at her, not understanding, which prompts a solid eye roll and a straightforward explanation, "It's over."

His eyes widen.

"Really?" he splutters. Surprise is the only emotion he can seem to muster; an actual response would have to wait. Or was he not supposed to have one at all?

Amy's lips curl and twist out a smile in a way that's as coded as any of the TARDIS's fifteen thousand ongoing algorithmic programs—the difference being that he can read the ones and zeros. "Really really."

"Oh," he says, feeling clumsy. He scratches his face nervously. "Do you—I mean—are you… alright?"

His attempt at support seems more amusing to her than comforting. "Yes." Her eyes flash, signaling a hint of mischief, which relieves him. Her old self returns in an instant, and he feels the mounted tension in his chest melting away. Fun Amy, Happy Amy, Good Amy. It doesn't matter what he calls her, only that she's back. "I'm brilliant," she continues. "So brilliant I could burst."

"Brilliant," he echoes brightly. "So you don't need to talk about it, or anything?"

"Do you want to hear about it?" Her tone suggests that she doesn't think so. Indignation flickers within him.

"If you want! I'm a very good listener, I'll have you know."

She settles back into the jumpseat. Her expression is unbearably smug. "Is that so?"

"It is. Universally renown. I could console you. If I wanted. And you wanted."

"Oh, you'd _console _me, would you?" she mocks, her voice lowering suggestively.

The Doctor huffs, though half the frustration he directs inward. He should be able to see that kind of remark coming by now. Fun Amy was also Suggestive Amy, a fact that he found difficult to remember.

"_Appropriately_," he corrects. "Like, patting your arm and hugging and things."

"And things." She keeps grinning.

"Are you going to tell me what happened or not?"

Another eye roll, and the act falls away. "Fine." She clears her throat, crossing and uncrossing her legs once before speaking.

He feels oddly anxious, like he's about to leap off a rocky outcrop into a tumultuous swell. No reason for nervousness occurs to him, but the feeling persists. It's not as if anything she could say would be relevant to him—his role here is as an observer, not an actor. That's the way it always is, the way it has to be. His dramas involve laser beams and high-speed chases; emotional machinations rest squarely in the realm of humanity.

Finally, she begins. "I went over, we spent the night together, and this morning I started getting on him about, I dunno, _boringness_. And I decided to tell him where I'd been. And he wasn't happy." He stares at her, waiting for more, but she only shrugs.

"That's it?"

"That's it."

His stare turns into a squint. He knows these creatures tend towards fragile feelings, but that sounds… well, it sounds a bit _too _fragile, as though it lacked the final nail in the coffin.

"You're quite sure that's the whole story?"

Amy looks straight at him, and for the first time since she's returned, he realizes. Her eyes are saucers, her jaw clenches and unclenches in succession as she clearly works through something.

"Bullocks," she breathes at last. "I gave him more of a reason to end it than… than I… well, it wasn't enough that I'd run off on the night before our wedding. I just added enough to get him there."

So she'd wanted their relationship to be over? This was news to him, and big news. Real headline material. _Good news or bad news, though? _He chose to omit the question. "What does that mean?"

She squirms, no more comfortable in this conversation than him. "I may have given him the impression that—I may have exaggerated a bit." Her attention is suddenly diverted to a loose thread on her skirt, which she picks at, not meeting his eye. Finally, she admits with a sheepish blush, "I told him I'd been with you." She rolls her eyes, barely grudging the full story: "Physically."

He feels himself stiffen, turn to stone. The freeze crunches up his arms from his fingertips and his toes to his hearts and his head, and he—who has only known movement for a millennium—is a statue. He can't help the voice in his mind that scolds, _she used you. And Rory, too, bandied him about as if he meant nothing to her. _The realization seizes and wracks him, and a myriad of things surge to his throat, protestations and accusations he could hurl at her. A person cries out who he tries to ignore; a person who showed himself, for example, on the decks of the Starship UK at the precipice of human calamity—a person who is as motley human himself as those who make him angry enough to act it. He swallows.

Instead, he says coolly, "You ought not to have done that, Amelia."

Amy seems taken aback. Whether she expected more or less of a reaction, he can't say. "Why, because I lied?"

"Yes, and he deserves better."

"So what's better?" she demands, though it's indignation that brings the color to her cheeks now.

"The truth of why you don't want to be with him." Those words feel strange on his tongue. _Want to be with him, want to be with him_. A voice in the back of his head, sounding not unlike River Song, chuckles. _This isn't your game, old man._

His companion seems blissfully unaware of his discomfort. She fights him tooth and nail, as always. "_He _dumped _me._"

"Not entirely of his own free will, as you've suggested."

"Well, I—" she struggles, glaring up at him, and then pops to her feet and paces across the deck. "It's none of your business."

He endeavors to keep his tone objectively level, to not betray anything unseemly, to recall his place. "On the contrary, it became my business the moment you told him I was involved."

"Alright, fine. I'm _sorry_ I insulted your honor. Or whatever this is." She makes a sweeping gesture in his direction, apparently trying to indicate his reaction. Her apology doesn't even feign sincerity. "Happy?"

The lemon-sucking face he makes is more than enough to answer her question, so he presses on. "You should go back and tell him the truth."

"I'm not doing that," she scoffs. "You go do it, if it's so important to you. I want to get out of here."

"We're not going anywhere until you've made amends." He slams down a lever on the console for emphasis. They're speaking quickly now, in an animated back and forth exchange, which they always do, but this is more of a shootout than a friendly volley.

"What, is there some kind of code I've got to follow to travel with you, now?"

"Always has been."

"And what if I break it? The code?"

He gambles on his answer, and not for low stakes. He believes, though. It'll work, it has to. The alternative… "Then you have to leave."

Her reply comes too fast. "Fine." Her tone is simple, almost terse. _Careless,_ he thinks.

A long beat passes. She makes no move for the door. They stare at each other.

She adds, "I'll see you."

She's waiting for him to rescind; it couldn't be more obvious. The look on her face is bloody expectant, and he feels a sudden surge of anger at her. It makes it all the harder that she knows him, knows he doesn't want her to go, that sending her away would be painful. But he could take the pain.

She takes a step towards him, and her eyes rake across his body, as she inquires, "Why _is _it so important to you?"

"The TARDIS is not a means of avoiding responsibility towards your friends and family. It's not an escape vehicle," he intones. The wise idea to move away from her strikes him, but not hard enough, and he's frozen to the spot.

"What else have you ever used it for?" A strangely plain question, coming from Amy. She watches for his reply with an expression that is all quivering resilience, but there's a note of pity in her voice, too.

It takes everything he has to just stand there, his mouth a thin line. He's torn between barely suppressed rage and an inflammed desire to pull her against him and press his face into her shoulder, just like the old times that are really all but brand new to him. Neither option is right, however, and that's all he's trying to do, something right.

His silence eats away at her quickly, and she moves away, to stand hunched over the railing with her back to him. "You were always involved, you know," she observes, and he's reeling again, because he thinks he's been caught. She's seen through his performance, unraveled him. And then she adds, "I wouldn't have left if it weren't for you. I would have just gotten married."

Relieved to be free of more clandestine accusations, he goes to join her, the two of them looking out one of the rounded glass windows to a galaxy beyond that sloppily overflows with stars. "Is that true?"

"What? That I'd have stayed with Rory?" She laughs. "You're definitely the homewrecker type."

He has to return the mirth, because she's funny, she is—funny, magnificent, ginger. "I've been called worse." He pauses; funny, magnificent, ginger, and too good for him, because his ego has always lived as much in his heart as it did in his head. "Perhaps it _is _best, if you…" It's harder to say when he actually means it, but Amy picks up the implication—he sees her smile grow sadder in an instant. Neither of them wants a separation, he realizes, but that can't matter. It will come sooner or later, regardless of anyone's feelings. He must not forget.

"Best for who?" she challenges.

"For everyone."

"I think we might have different definitions for best, then." Does Amy ever think to herself? It seems like when she speaks it's the most marvelously candid thing, like her thoughts might never be turned against her. "But best is just your way of saying easier, isn't it?"

"No—"

"Listen, I know you're all embroiled in this dramatic battle with yourself because you fancy me and you don't think you should—"

His stomach drops ten meters into the floor. "Amy, that is _not—_"

"Don't." A finger to his lips and he's pouting again. She continues, unshaken, "The whole point of this thing isn't that you take someone along to make you miserable, it's the other way around. I'm not sentimental, so I'll move on when I want to." He remembers the dolls and cartoons and dress up of her youth, and wonders what that it is, if not sentimental. "I won't _die_."

"No, Amy," he says tiredly but firmly, all that he has left.

She shrugs and glares. "Idiot."

"I know," he replies, trying not to sound utterly pathetic but failing, as usual. He smiles a melancholy one and moves away, back to the control panel. "Rory tomorrow."

Her last protest is a little grumble, and then she throws in the towel. "Fine. But you'll never get me off this spaceship."

He sighs. There is no more fight in him, not tonight, and he finds comfort in that fact that if she _really _wanted him she'd just snog him while he's down.

"I'm going to bed," she announces, and starts for the stairs. A thought seems to grasp her, and she pauses, and turns back to him. "Your loss," she says, lilting provocatively, and she's going to kill him, one day, if he doesn't do it first. He manages a strangled laugh.

"My loss."

Another shrug and she traipses off.

* * *

><p>A long bath leaves her feeling contemplative as she lies in bed, waiting to be overcome by drowsiness.<p>

Rory tomorrow—and there's no way to make the Doctor understand that righteous isn't always right, that white lies save people sometimes, because in all his thousand years of life he must have picked up on that important truth. But it's uncanny, the way he lets her get to his head.

She likes it.

At least when she's not worrying about whether he's gotten to hers.

The lie she told Rory had nothing to do with the Doctor, she's certain. Well, it had _something_ to do with the Doctor, but only because his was the name she'd dropped. _It was easier that way, _she thinks. _Easier than the truth. _The situation had not been any different than the usual, honestly: she had known what she wanted, beneath the surface of her brain. And when an opportunity showed itself to achieve that goal, it sprung into her consciousness, and she'd just—done it. Said the thing, the exaggeration.

As challenging as it had been to watch the hurt wash over Rory, she knew it would have paled in comparison to the truth. Because the truth is complicated, in all ways but one. _I don't know what I want, but it's not that._

Well—there were a few things. Like, she wanted not to be rejected continuously. Quite reasonable, by her estimation. Furthermore, she wanted the Doctor to confess everything; to tell her she was beautiful and damn sexy and one of the most challenging, persuasive, brave people ever to travel with him, and that he—

That was an exceedingly complicated desire. It puzzled her. She moved on.

A plan hatched in the back of her mind, amidst all the swirling, occasionally conflicting wants and needs. For all the confusion she was feeling, there was one thing which never failed to appeal: a victory.

The last thought in her mind before she drifts off is that if it's the truth he wants, then it's the truth he'll get.

* * *

><p>AN2, added 815/12 around 7:15 PM EST: Yes, I know that if Amy and Rory aren't together, River wouldn't exist. It's an issue I plan to deal with in a later chapter, so hold tight.


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